Healthcare automation startup Olive announced the launch of Olive Ventures last week, a new in-house studio aimed at creating “world-class digital health solutions,” according to its website.
Olive will give early-stage entrepreneurs access to its platform, where they can quickly deploy and distribute their offerings. The goal is to streamline scaling; founders will have access to hundreds of organizations using Olive.
"We're bridging the 'valley of death' in the healthcare startup landscape," said Sean Lane, CEO of Olive, in the announcement. "I've seen far too many great ideas be shot down without ever completing a pilot project. We're charting a new path for digital health innovators by killing the traditional pilot and rewriting the entire process to be better, smarter and faster."
Founders will follow predetermined milestones and inspections as they develop their ideas. Olive Ventures will offer access to funding via broader investment opportunities once a product is ready to be released. It also plans to invest as part of any venture capital rounds, Columbus Business First reported.
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Two companies are already being built with the help of Olive Ventures: Violet, a bank where patients can pay healthcare bills in installments, and Rotera, an artificial intelligence company that develops custom solutions for providers and payers.
"Through Olive Ventures, we brought an idea to market inside a month that will positively impact thousands of healthcare workers in our first year alone,” said Erick McKesson, CEO of Rotera, in the announcement. “When it comes to creating a company, the time to market and immediate impact we can have with Olive is truly unmatched in healthcare."
"Violet's business model is based on aligning incentives with our customers,” Violet CEO Josh Holley noted in the announcement. “While traditional banks make money from fees and interest, we become more financially healthy as our customers do. That made Olive's customer-centric approach a natural fit for us, and we couldn't be happier to be working with Olive to make healthcare better together."
In July, Olive raised $400 million in a funding round, raising its valuation to $4 billion, it claimed. Earlier this year, Olive also acquired surgical data analytics company Empiric Health.